Wednesday, July 15, 2009

PMDV: Lessons Learned

On Monday I "released" Version 0.1. Not only did I blog about it, I sent private emails to people I know asking them to take a look. I'm going to summarize the good and the bad here.

SYSI had planned all along to put the objects in the SYS schema as Oracle treats it differently. By differently I mean that it's more secure than any other user/schema. You cannot create objects in the schema as another user, even with DBA privileges. Same goes for executing code, you need an explicit GRANT from SYS in order to run a package. I can't think of one off the top of my head, but around on or after 9i, DBMS_SESSION needed to be granted explicitly to users.

What's the lesson learned? Well, if you create objects in the SYS schema you now have an unsupported database. Yikes. I don't want that to happen and I will be updating the instructions tonight to reflect that (not that anyone has gone and thrown it in production yet).

What's in a Name?Poor Man's Data Vault was not the best choice of names. I knew that all along really, but stuck with it just because. Someone suggested that the general concept might be related a bit more to Audit Vault; my only exposure to it was at COLLABORATE.

If there are any good ideas out there, let them fly. The only constraint? You have to use the letters P, M, D and V. Why? Because I've prefixed everything with that. :)

DocumentationDocumentation is hard, but I tried to get down as much as possible on the wiki. A friend and former colleague (twice), told me it sucked. It wasn't very descriptive or clear as to the purpose. I don't think it sucked, but it wasn't good or even great. Mediocre maybe?

I believe the goals have changed a bit so I'll need to adjust. Actually, I'll need to refactor my goals.

I will try to use the criticism wisely and allow that the help shape the new goals.

I'll have to change the target audience...well, define one. I had bigger shops (multiple DBAs) in mind initially or a place that needed to be SOX compliant. Maybe it should be small or medium size shops? I don't know.